Celebrating who we are

Their three-day feast celebrating a bountiful harvest in 1621 is what many Americans regard as the nation's first Thanksgiving.

Of course it wasn't the first such celebration, any more than Plymouth Colony was the first permanent English settlement in the new world. That first enclave of English speakers was established along the brackish waters of the James River in Virginia in 1607.

Historians have recorded several ceremonies of thanks predating Plymouth Colony among European settlers, including the British colonists in Virginia in 1619.

That year is remarkable in this nation's history for two reasons quite apart from Thanksgiving, although the first certainly should be remembered with thanks.

On July 30, 1619, the first representative government in the Americas met in a church in Jamestown. The House of Burgesses, as it was called, established the principle of representative government in British North America.

Late the next month, "20 and Odd" Africans arrived aboard a Dutch man-of-war and were sold or traded into servitude for supplies. Their arrival helped fill Jamestown's desperate need for labor to work in the colony's rapidly developing and highly profitable tobacco industry. Although technically "indentured servants" when they first arrived, over the years slavery as we understand it today became legally codified, and tens of thousands of blacks poured into the nation in the following decades.

Not to ignore the suffering of those held in slavery or the sin that is the institution itself, one thing should not be forgotten, according to the science author Charles C. Mann: Most of the hands that built this nation before the mass European migrations began were black hands.

"American history is often described in terms of Europeans entering a nearly empty wilderness," Mann wrote in "1493."

"For centuries, though, most of the newcomers were African ...."

Those nameless millions cleared the land, drained the swamps and built the roads and levees.

For that largely ignored fact, thanks would not be inappropriate today just as it's not inappropriate to celebrate this nation's good fortune and our own blessings.

And it would not be inappropriate to remember that in 1863, at the height of the Civil War to free those millions of slaves, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November as a national day of thanksgiving (Franklin Roosevelt later clarified that Thanksgiving should always be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November).

And so here we are today, a nation whose people have much to be thankful for. Enjoy it with friends and family.